by Andre Brink
Handful of Feathers
Tant Poppie was indoors too, working at her hearth.
“No rain this time either,” I said as I sat down at the table.
She placed the soup plates before us, poured the apostles with such energy that half of the liquid was spilled, and sat down opposite me.
Her prayer sounded more like a prolonged curse than anything else.
“Did Annie-of-Alwyn calm down a bit?” she asked after slurping down the first spoonful of thick broth.
“It’s tough on her,” I said. “But she’s a strong woman.”
She blew into her soup, sending a vigorous spray across the table. “There’s something let loose amongst us,” she said. “And it’s time we got a grip on it. This business you stirred up about Ouma Liesbet isn’t going to lie down soon.”
“I only did what she ordered me to do.”
She blew like a hippopotamus again. And I sensed that only her nose and ears were visible above the water: the rest was churning up mud below.
“You reckon it was Ben Owl who killed her?”
“It’s in Lukas Death’s hands now.”
“No, Neef Flip,” she said. “It’s not so easily said and done. You can’t just come in here from outside and stir up things and think you can leave it to us to clear up the mess after you.”
“I have to go back at dawn tomorrow morning, Tant Poppie,” I said. “What happened to Ouma Liesbet is indeed for the people here to solve.”
“That old bastard Pilate also tried to wash his hands,” she said, draining her apostle and filling up her mug again. After a few moments she asked, “And did you find what you came for?”
“No,” I said frankly. “I gathered as much as I could, but it’s only a handful of feathers.”
“What else did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Facts. History.”
“And don’t you think Ouma Liesbet’s death is history?”
“It goes further than Ouma Liesbet. It’s about the whole Devil’s Valley, over more than a hundred and fifty years. I know now it’s not so easy.”
“I had visitors this afternoon. They told me that after I brought Annie home you accused Ben Owl about Maria’s death too.” Her eyes scuttled across my face.
“I didn’t accuse him,” I said emphatically. “We opened the coffin in which Ouma Liesbet said Maria had been buried. It was empty. From there Lukas Death did the questioning.”
“And did Emma have anything to say?” she asked out of the blue.
“Why should she?” I asked; she must have noticed that she’d upset me.
“She never stopped asking about her mother.”
“It’s only to be expected, isn’t it? Especially if nobody wants to give a straight answer.”
“You shouldn’t have dragged Ben Owl into it.”
“Why not?” I asked. My fuse was getting short.
“Because Ben Owl is Emma’s father.”
Off Her Head
I shook my head briskly as if she’d thrown an apostle in my face. “Come again?”
“I know about the story that her mother ran away from here and came back pregnant. But her mother wasn’t that kind of girl. It was just that she didn’t want to come back. Lukas Death was the one who went to fetch her. And when she came back all the wildness was gone. She married Ben Owl and settled down with him. He always had a soft spot for her, she grew up before his eyes. But then as she started swelling she went off her head. Some women just get like that, you know. And as soon as the child was born she ran off and drowned herself in the Devil’s Hole. They never found her body. From that time no one goes there any more.”
“Why did you bring her up and not Ouma Liesbet who was a blood relative?”
“Because from the time Maria died Ben Owl got funny in the head. It got so bad no one could talk to him any more. And he seemed to blame the child for her mother’s death. That’s why I brought her up. It was my Christian duty.”
I sat staring at the table, no longer in any mood to eat.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked.
“One doesn’t serve one’s burnt bread to guests.”
“Then what makes it different tonight?”
“Because you’re going away tomorrow, you can’t do any more harm.” She got up and cleared away the dishes. “And I know you can’t keep your eyes off Emma.”
“How can you say such a thing?”
“I’m not blind.”
I tried to get up, but sank back on my chair. I wasn’t prepared for this.
She started wiping the plates and bowls with a dirty dry cloth, as always. “Now you see it’s just as well you’re leaving us. If you stayed, there would have been no end of trouble.”
I didn’t wait for her to go to bed, but went out with a mumbled excuse. This was my last night in the Devil’s Valley. I had no time to lose. I felt a deep need to be with Emma. But first I had an appointment with Ben Owl.
Bare Yourself
Ouma Liesbet was again huddled on her rooftop in the dark. Unless it was an owl; but I had no time to check, there was no more I could do for her, even though I knew very well that she wouldn’t go away again. They accompany us everywhere, the legions of the dead, all of them, mostly invisible, inaudible, but always there, all the voices silenced, all the stories forever unfinished.
Ben Owl was sitting on the steps to his stoep in the dark smoking his pipe as if he’d been expecting me. For once there were no voices from his head to interrupt the conversation.
“Neef Flip.”
I remained at a safe distance just in case there was a pick or a spade within reach.
“You must be a happy man,” he said with heavy, unrestrained bitterness.
“Why did you kill Ouma Liesbet, Ben?”
He sat cracking his knuckles, first one hand, then the other. “It was for your own good, man. She had no right telling you everything.”
“She hardly told me anything.”
“But I heard her promise that she’d tell you all if you came back.”
“Was that so bad then?”
“Bad or not, those things were not meant for your ears. All these years we’ve been living here without trouble. When somebody comes in from outside we pull in head and feet like a tortoise. Because you people don’t understand.”
Even though I’d heard this so many times before, I protested, “Perhaps I’d have understood more if the people of the valley had been more forthcoming.”
“One can’t bare oneself to the world like that. That’s indecent.”
“Indecent?” For a moment my anger boiled over. “This place is a bloody den of evil and then you talk about decency?”
“It’s easy to call something evil if you don’t understand, Neef Flip. And you understand nothing. You hear me? Nothing. Nothing.”
“Are you Emma’s father?” I shot the question at him; it was the only way to catch him off guard.
“Says who?”
“Says Tant Poppie.” There was no need to protect anyone any more. In a place where everybody’s hand was against everyone, it might be the only way to reach a grain of truth.
“That old aardvark pokes her nose into every antheap. But she knows nothing.”
“She said Lukas Death went to bring Maria back to you after she ran away. And then you married her?”
“Yes, I married her,” he said unexpectedly frank. “What else could I do?”
“I don’t understand.”
“She was carrying an outsider’s child in her. If they found out they’d have killed her.”
“They killed her anyway.”
He pulled at his pipe, but it had long gone out and all he produced was an empty hiss.
Drove Me Crazy
“Then Emma isn’t your child?”
“If only she was,” said Ben Owl. “Don’t you understand anything? That girl, Maria, grew up in front of me. I loved her long before she started to grow molehills. But she never wanted to
have anything to do with me. Not even after I married her to give the child a name. And that was what drove me crazy. The day the child was born Maria chased me away, said she never wanted to see me again. It was unbearable. I tell you, I was crying like a baby. She started laughing and shouting at me. Said I wasn’t a real man, I didn’t deserve to have a wife. It was as if the earth just caved in under me. I didn’t know what I was saying, it just burst from me. Tant Poppie and the other women who were there for the birth must have heard it. That was how the people found out the child was an outsider’s. So they killed Maria, and it was because of me. I couldn’t stop them. But I couldn’t leave her under that heap of stones either. So I went to plead with Ouma Liesbet and she said we could use her coffin.”
“And then you buried Maria in the night? But this morning the coffin was empty.”
He stood up. He was trembling. “The night after that I went back to the graveyard on my own. This time Ouma Liesbet didn’t know about it. I carried Maria’s body all the way up to the Devil’s Hole. I told you mos I was crazy.” And then he began to cry, hideous, muffled little sobbing sounds, like the hooting of an owl. “All those years Maria never let me lay a hand on her. How many times did I ask Hans Magic to give me a potion to win her love, but he wouldn’t. I think he had an eye on her himself, the dirty bastard. Once when he was out I crept into his house to find the right doepa. I knew where he kept his stuff. But then he put his curse on me. Look at my foot, all shrivelled up. After that Maria loathed me even more. For years and years and years. All in vain. Do you know what that does to a man? But now she was dead. For once she couldn’t resist.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“It was the only time ever,” he said. “And afterwards I threw her into the Devil’s Hole. Where not even Hans Magic would find her. From that day I haven’t been able to sleep a wink at night.”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.
“Now see what you did,” he sobbed.
Fireflies
THAT NIGHT, I think, was one of the weirdest in my life. Emma was waiting for me in the dark in front of Isak Smous’s house, so motionless against a half-broken pillar on the stoep that she looked like a pillar herself. We didn’t speak before we were well beyond the last houses. Hand in hand we walked up to the bluegum forest. For the moment there was no need of anything more. If it hadn’t been for the warmth of her hand in mine and the movement of her hip against me as we walked, it would have been possible to imagine that it was another fucking dream, like that night of the full moon when I’d met Henta and her sprites up here. Tonight the moon was far from full, yet it wasn’t particularly dark, as if the night had a kind of luminosity of its own, like an ancient fire not yet extinguished; and there were fireflies among the trees.
I told her about my visit to Ben Owl. Beforehand I’d decided to keep the worst from her; I mean, Jesus, there was no need to expose her to that final humiliation. But when it came to it, I couldn’t restrain myself. It was important for both of us that she know what I knew. Except for Ben’s fucking necrophilia. That I had to spare her. And she didn’t seem particularly shocked by the rest either. She barely reacted, just pressed my hand more tightly while I told her how Ben had dug up her mother’s body to dispose of it in the Devil’s Hole.
“You think he told the truth?” she asked at last.
All I could answer, like the last time when we’d spoken about Ouma Liesbet, was “Emma, when one is on the verge of death lies just don’t make sense any more.”
She said, “I think it’s even easier to lie if you know you’re going to die.”
Around us was the night, and the wood, once again heavy with near-soundless sound, that low rustle and murmur of voices whispering and moaning and calling out, of bodies writhing and wrestling.
“Can you ever be sure of what happened to her?” I asked.
“I’ll just have to learn to live with it.”
“But it’s in our nature to look for something to hold on to. Footprints to lead you somewhere.”
But even as I said it I remembered that first time I’d seen her at the rock pool, when she, too, hadn’t left any footprints.
Leaves A Scar
“You’re like a bird,” I said in another of my embarrassing poetic moments. “You fly through the air without leaving a scar.”
“It leaves a scar on the eye.”
“There are no birds here,” I said.
“Yes, I’m afraid old Lukas Up-Above took them all away with him.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“How will we ever know? Does it matter? All you really need is a story that makes sense to you.”
“I want to know everything about you,” I said.
“No, tell me about you,” she said. “There’s so much I still don’t know. And I want to remember when you’re gone.”
I started telling again, without shape or sequence. Protected by the dark flickering with fireflies, so fucking magical that even while I was there I couldn’t believe it, I grasped at whatever came past. The shitty little village where I grew up. Ma and Pa. My little brother Dolf. When I hesitated, or got stuck in a memory, she urged me on: “You must remember.”
“You wouldn’t want to hear it all.”
“I do want to. I must.”
“I don’t want to remember.”
“Perhaps you’ve been running away for too long.”
“What makes you think I’m running away?”
“It’s the only reason why people come to the Devil’s Valley.”
“I think you brought me here,” I said lightly.
“Did you think I’d be different from the other women you have known?”
“Yes. And I was right.”
“Don’t speak too soon.” With her open palm she stroked across my chest, and down one arm, the back of my hand. “Why didn’t it work out with Sylvia?”
“We were too unprepared. I was too unsure of myself, too suspicious. I couldn’t believe she’d really love a man like me.”
“And do you think I can?”
“You shouldn’t. But I wish you could.”
“Was it very bad with her?”
“It was hell.”
“For her too?”
I nodded slowly. “Yes. If I look back now, I think it must have been even worse for her.”
“How come that you lasted so long?”
“I think in the long term you can’t go on without the hurt any more. It’s the only way to make sure you’re still alive.”
“But before that, right in the beginning, it must have been good?”
“It’s too far back to remember.”
“I want you to try.”
After a long pause I said, “Yes, I think it was good. I’m sure it was.”
“And you loved each other?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
I told her everything I could remember.
Then she asked, “And before you met Sylvia?”
I told her whatever random memories came to me. About Maureen behind the sofa, and Belinda at her floral curtains, my first clumsy efforts at university. And all the wasted years that followed. When I’d drained myself, she kept on stroking the back of my hand.
After a long silence she said, “So these are your stories.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“I believe you.”
In the dark her eyes looked at me. I couldn’t see them, but I knew them. And in spite of everything that had happened during the day, all the shocks and disillusionments and discoveries, the tracks true and false, the whole fucking whirlpool of events, there was a mysterious sense of joy just in being there with her, even while not knowing, not understanding, not wanting to try any more.
All around us the libidinous sounds continued in the night, but we remained untouched by it all in our small chaste space; because for us desire was excluded, we were beyond it now, for us I think no redemption was
possible.
Residue of Reason
We returned through the sweet-smelling wood, past the open space where the ostrich pen had been, around heaps of rubble blown together by the wind, and broken shacks and sheds, to Isak Smous’s house.
When we reached the front stoep she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “Don’t go.”
In silence we tiptoed through the dark voorhuis to her room. There, in absolute darkness, she stood against me for a moment, her head against my shoulder; then she pushed me gently back on the narrow bed. She came to lie against me, fully clothed, her back curved against me.
“Just hold me,” she whispered. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
I folded my arms over her. She held one of my hands against her mouth, a small gesture of trust that wholly disarmed me.
And so we remained through the long night, without talking, without sleeping, in a state of grace on the other side of passion. I couldn’t deny the body, it was there, yet it was as if I was not really implicated in it. Perhaps there was a residue of reason in it too: I was an outsider here, if she fell pregnant they would kill her—as simple as that. And yet it didn’t really have anything to do with practical concerns about pregnancy. It was, rather, a kind of resignation, knowing that this was all we could have, all we could grasp, and perhaps all we bloody well needed.
When in the sad dawn I got up to go, she sat up. She said nothing, but her hand sought mine and held it. Her eyes asked what she did not dare to.
I kissed her on the forehead, committing myself to the mystery of her.
“I’m not going away any more, Emma,” I said. “For as long as you’re here, I’ll stay.”
